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Cutting Out the Middle Men in Scientific Publishing
Black Parrot writes: "Just got a message that was sent to several mailing lists used by machine learning researchers, announcing the mass resignation of the Editorial Board of one prominent ML journal (i.e., the scholars who make a peer reviewed journal work). The reason? 'Times have changed. ... We see little benefit accruing to our community from a mechanism that ensures revenue for a third party by restricting the communication channel between authors and readers.' It's the music industry vs. artists and consumers, writ small. You can see the full text of the message at the UAI archive. This sort of thing has been bubbling for a couple of years. The letter mentions other cases, and I know that several thousand biological researchers have threatened to go on strike against any journal that does not make their articles downloadable for free after a fixed delay from the date of publication. The trend toward more toll booths is not the only force at work in the Internet Age!"
Seems to me there are plenty of people/groups/organisations/etc are not required within distribution chains (and many other "chains" for that matter).
Start the revolution and get rid of them all!
Note: Some things that seem superfluous are in fact a key component to a system. Excercise good judgement and then cut out the waste : )
"Things that you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden (via Diogenes of Sinope).
Don't we have a halfway decent peer-review system right here on